


Natural colds

by lizdenys (majalis)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dementors, Depression, Gen, everyone will probably make a cameo sometime, sadly unclear when I'll have time to update, sometimes canon makes me sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 20:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7403617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/majalis/pseuds/lizdenys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People didn't just deal with Dementors by casting the Patronus Charm - the missing, more diverse ways of handling the shrouded Dark creatures and depression.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lisa Turpin

**Author's Note:**

> Of course, the characters and settings are not my own, and I'm just borrowing them to play a while.
> 
> This is rated teen primarily for allusions and discussions of depression, but also for language. I will update the archive warnings and tag chapters specifically should other difficult topics or specific difficult experiences with depression come out in them.
> 
> Since the chapters are each stand-alone short stories, I am unlikely to update this on a regular schedule, but I will post when I have the inspiration to work through more of my experiences with depression.
> 
> I'm also cross-posting this on blog.lizdenys.com.

Lisa Turpin accidentally left her potions textbooks at Herbology. Fearful of losing house points for being unprepared for class later, she snuck away from the line of students Professor Sprout was leading back to the castle. Maybe she should have been more concerned about the Dementors everyone was buzzing about. Maybe she should have felt a little more guilty for failing to care about Ravenclaw's standing in the House Cup, but nothing could distract her from the mortifying prospect that the other students would remember her existence as Professor Snape would mention her name.

_One foot in front of the other, keep your head down, focus on the ground. Focus on slipping farther and farther into your robes and away from view._

"Shit."

She had been told they floated slightly above you before closing in on you fast as hawks; she thought keeping her head away from the clouds could help to keep her safe. She had been told they were physically imposing as well emotionally tolling; she couldn't have expected one to be half her height. Yet, this little one crept into her view along the hems of her robes, hovered around her feet _dancing_.

The Dementor's dark, bony finger stuck towards her mouth then curled back towards whatever face was hiding behind its tattered, black hood as it floated up to meet her height.

For a moment, what must have been its face looked like a mirror staring back at her, her features fully intact. Abruptly, the image vanished; in its place was the vivid reality of nothingness.

Her friends had guessed nothingness to be the deepest black, a chillingly dark sensation, but she knew that wasn't nothingness. Nothingness was whatever was hid behind it until it flashed white to a blur of colors too tangled to latch onto anything specific; nothingness was the confusion of time - the breath-stealing realization there was no tomorrow, no _today_.

The hypnotizing kaleidoscope of every color all at once hiding behind that drooping black hood circled to her right, her gaze obeying the command to follow. After the Dementor spun her around seven times, she could have sworn it smirked at her before mouthing something that wasn't quite a kiss to abruptly release her eyes from its trance.

A sharp chill ran up her spine, and the tiny Dementor slid back under the back of her robes. It pulled away its hold on her thoughts in its retreat, left her body quivering, her mind reeling.

The cold dissipated through her limbs; her scattered thoughts cleared. In their place, a small ball of dread knotted into her gut. She mustered the little strength left at her disposal to push it deeper from the surface and walked back to the castle for class.

***

Luna Lovegood was buried in the latest issue of _The Quibbler_ when she heard the common room door creak and watched Lisa Turpin walk in with her head pointed directly towards her toes, shoulders slouched.

"Hey, Lisa," Luna offered with a smile. "Everything alright?"

"I'm fine." The Dementor hiding beneath her stirred to lightly tickle her ankles. "Just tired."

"Okay, if you need anything..."

The almost soft tickles became aggressive - Lisa twitched forward and hastily turned towards the dorms. _No one caught that, right?_ She felt the Dementor shift left then right as though it was replying with a firm "no" then looked over her left shoulder back towards Luna and quickly mumbled, "Thanks."

As she stepped up the stairs, the little Dementor relented.

***

Hours turned into days turned into weeks, and the little bugger wouldn't leave her alone.

The tickling, the bouts of sudden colds grew unremarkable then unnoticeable - everything blurred into a hardened, all-encompassing nothingness.

Even though her grades didn't slip, her interest in charms slid away. Essay topics she used to approach with vigor became mechanical; her wand flicks lost their luster.

Luna worried more and more as Lisa withdrew more quickly from her meals to the common room before others got there, then to her room as soon as her housemates turned in for the evening. She smiled and tried to engage her with the latest from _The Quibbler_ or her favorite moments from Care of Magical Creatures. Luna offered an eager ear and big, patient eyes day after day or just quietly sat nearby when she could, but she just couldn't get through.

***

One day, Lisa was staring listlessly out her dorm room's window - the Dementor sitting at her side, its fingers playing at her shoulder - when one of the castle's owls dropped the letter it was carrying on the lawn. Frantically, the barn owl dove down towards the puddle where the note landed.

As the letter floated down the puddle, the owl scampered towards it, tripped over its legs twice. The letter reached the edge of the puddle and shored onto the grass. Instead of picking it up, the owl lingered to twist and shake as if to take a bath - forgetting there was no way for it to get clean in the dirt-filled water.

Unamused, the Dementor shifted to its right, pulled Lisa's arm towards it, away from the sight of the now dirty owl writhing around in its muddy bathwater.

"I'm watching that!" She snapped at the dark, little form. Unable to look away from the owl's movement, she broke out in an exuberant laughter - the kind that comes from the bottom of your belly.

The Dementor kept tugging at her sleeve, but minutes passed - Lisa kept chuckling. Inspired by the barn owl, she peeled away towards the girls' bathroom to sing through a long hot shower, and bored, the Dementor waltzed away.


	2. Sirius Black

No one _really_ expected Sirius Black to survive in Azkaban for long. Sure, Sirius had exuded confidence and determination to a fault, but Dementors never failed to break down those walls.

But Sirius was also exceedingly clever and had a dirty little furry secret on his side: when he felt his excitement, his compassion, his sense of humor, his humanity slip away from him, he'd morph into his animagus form, the fluffy dog his godson would later call Snuffles.

That particularly furry, big black dog had a peculiar immunity to the Dementors feeding: the creatures didn't know how to prey on non-human thought processes. Maybe someone else, like the Hermione he'd meet years later, would publish something about how animagi had a natural resistance to their feeding. Even if Sirius could develop the patience for that kind of scientific writing, he wouldn't want these "tricks" to become public so freely, to fall into the hands of the _wrong_ people; the Death Eaters who were fully devoid of compassion _deserved_ this punishment. Surely, this technique was intended solely for people like him - people who could think back to first moment they sat next to James, his future best friend, on the Hogwarts Express at eleven; people who could remember the relief painted on Remus's face when Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs showed up at the Shrieking Shack as animagi; people who could recall with perfect clarity the smile on his face when his best friend told him Lily enthusiastically proclaimed "yes"; people who could tap into these memories to produce a full corporeal patronus had the ministry not unjustly seized their wands.

Sirius would swear left and right that he had been transforming into Snuffles all those years he was locked up to perfect his escape plan, but if he was being truthful, he'd admit that it had nothing to do with escape at first, just self-preservation, survival. That first hooded void peering into his eyes, poring through his memories, picking out his conversation with James about getting Harry a broomstick for Christmas, sucking it away. He could see the frames from his memory flow out of his body, the continuity between them peeling apart, until they became just a small set of fading photos barely outlining the story - the end of a letter from James and Lily, a page out of a Quidditch catalog, kneeling on the floor and seeing a coal face in his fireplace. Losing the moving pictures was depressing; gaining the intense urge to sob but lacking the physical will to do so was devastating.

As that Dementor pulled away, Sirius's forehead involuntarily alternated between stretching past its edges and constricting back into itself, and he became suddenly aware that he couldn't quite feel his fingers or his toes. Snuffles rarely suffered his physical ailments - headaches from hangovers disappeared; he could keep warm while running away to the Potters’. Now Sirius learned that Snuffles could push out emotional trials as well.

As time went on, the Dementors wore down on him more and more, _broke_ him. His pleasant memories, his hope for vindication, his desire for freedom slipped away, leaving him alone with the despair of his wrongful conviction. Locked in the moment with James’s body lifeless across the floor, Lily’s merely feet away, Harry’s screams. Hallucinating James’s spirit holding Lily in his arms, bawling at the sight of Harry, shrieking at Sirius for letting it happen.

So his anxiety rose; Snuffles itched more. He grew skinnier, more pale; Snuffles lost weight, too, and his fur lost its sheen. Transforming for about a half hour only after meals turned into an hour, then two; later, he started becoming Snuffles after waking up, too. Eventually he was Snuffles whenever he was away from Dementors, even during sleep.

As the amount of time he spent as a human dwindled, his memory faded. Deeply fearful that the core of his humanity would follow - well, more specifically, he was afraid he'd lose his wit, his cunning, his good looks, his charm, or worse, his desire for mischief and his lust for women - if he stayed Snuffles too long, he tried to keep what he started to call "mutt time" to a minimum.

One day in 1993, he didn't wake before a Dementor brought him breakfast - he was still asleep as Snuffles. He immediately panicked. Before he could even realize that the additional crime of being an illegal animagus would ensure his punishment went on even after his name was finally cleared, an emaciated Snuffles darted through the cell door, out of the prison, started swimming across North Sea.

When he finally reached the shore, the hole in his mind dug out by the Dementors filled itself with the sudden reality of his future - Harry.


	3. Henry Hicks

Henry Hicks possessed a natural knack for charms, the inexplicable youthful energy of a second year, and that stereotypically Slytherin ambition - a convenient combination for someone determined to learn the Patronus Charm.

Last night when he entered the dungeons, Draco, Vincent, and Gregory had sat strewn across the couches, mocking the day's Defense lessons on the subject.

_"Pathetic."_

_"It's not even like those sad animal shaped flicks of light can do more than shew a Dementor away; they can't actually kill them."_

_"Plus, how scary can something actually be when it's afraid of illusions?"_

_"Who cares? Those tricks won't save them from the Dark Lord."_

Professor Flitwick caught wind of Henry's plan and worried about how he would handle failure - Henry was already having a tough time in Slytherin after some certain other students had found out his father was a Squib - but those same difficulties reassured the professor of Henry's resilience.

Henry wasn't actually afraid of Dementors - at least not in any immediate sense, as they'd been driven out of Hogwarts a couple of years ago. His interest in the Patronus Charm grew from conversations with his father, who having lacked magical powers became a Muggle psychologist. Starting when Henry was a young boy, his father had emphasized the importance of "practicing happiness". Henry wasn't entirely sure what this meant yet, but he liked being encouraged to occasionally linger on moments where he felt engaged, contented, _loved_.

After hearing about the charm a few weeks ago, he owled home asking about it. His mother responded that she had cast it occasionally just because - they were fortunate enough to have stayed safe despite the war - and that if he channeled his father's happiness exercises, he would be most of the way to supplying the memory needed to cast it.

When Henry found moments to himself, he would attempt to cast the spell. "Expecto Patronum" rolled easily off his tongue, but even after a dozen or so attempts, the best he got off was a steady stream of light he could circle around his body.

He didn't mind - despite failing to cast a corporeal Patronus, he enjoyed the warmth the charm left flowing throughout his body. Someday, he was sure, he'd find out what shape his guardian took, but for now, this was enough.


End file.
